Tricks
by TheyCallMeLoony
Summary: Just because he had learned his lesson doesn't mean he can force his heart to apply it. It doesn't mean he can't play pranks, or flirt, or be happy around her... Or kiss her, or be hopelessly in love with her. RLNT and Sirius, who refuses to be ignored.


"Kiss me, then," she says, and for a moment he doubts whether he had even heard her right, because she can't be saying what he thinks she is. She can't be, all of a sudden, daring him to do something he had been thinking about for weeks, something he'd yearned to do for longer than he'd care to admit. Because being hopelessly, glaringly in love with a woman thirteen years his junior is frowned upon by a vast majority of people. And because a lycanthrope hopelessly, glaringly in love with a woman young and whole is nothing but unacceptable.

But here she was: her eyes shining and unreadable, her hands on her hips in a challenge the marauder in him, still alive and well, can never resist.

All of this had started the other day, when he charmed the troll leg that served as the order's umbrella stand by the doorway to follow her around the moment she had tripped over it, demanding that she say sorry in thirty different languages. He didn't know what made him do it, the schoolboy bullying a girl he secretly fancied suddenly manifesting himself in the greying professor who certainly should know better.

He never imagined she would retaliate the way she did, although inwardly he admits that he really should've known she would. She hid all of his chocolate, even the ones he thought no one would ever find, and to Remus, that was the signal for the start of an all-out war.

The last week had been reminiscent of his Hogwarts days, when pranks were pulled left, right, and center, and the world was a haze of laughter and anxiety and excitement wrecked by an unstoppable desire to top the other. Sirius had decided that he simply must join in, too, that you can never hold a prank war and expect him to resist joining - and soon the whole house seemed like it was inhabited by a bunch of insatiably mischievous teenagers instead of three responsible adults, one of them a professor, and the other an Auror. (Sirius, he can still let pass. The man was utterly impossible.)

But still, he can't help but think that this was surely no way a thirty-something should-be-responsible professor should act, except that he hadn't felt more alive and happy in years. His best friend was back, and the girl – no, the woman – he likes is paying him more attention that he thinks is even due to an old werewolf.

He pulls himself back to the present, and surveys the woman standing in front of him with a challenging smile on her lips and a dare shining in her eyes.

"How do I know this isn't some other trick? To get back at me for getting back at you for getting back at me for that first trick?" he jokingly asks, savouring the way she rolls her eyes and curves her lips into the half-smile he had grown so fond of, had been trying to draw out of her since the first time she had shown it to him. But to be quite honest he was waiting for some sort of sign to tell him not to hope because hoping only leads to disappointment and attachments to people in a war can only ever lead to such terrible, terrible pain in the end.

He had learned his lesson.

Only deep inside, he knows that challenge or not, trick or not, he had already attached himself to her, fallen for her, from the moment she had first entered the room on that rainy August night, her electric blue eyes dancing in the firelight from some long-forgotten joke and her pink hair garishly fighting off all the gloom in the stuffy old house. Just because he had learned his lesson doesn't mean he can force his heart to apply it. It doesn't mean he can force himself to not feel these things he feels for her, in all its depth and passion and glory, barely hidden under the surface. But still he moves slowly forward, half of him already hellbent into fulfilling her dare, the other, more rational part growing steadily less decided with every vanilla-infused breath he took, every rise and fall of her chest as she continued to look at him.

At last, she speaks, her voice so soft it sounds like cotton. "Why don't you come over here and see for yourself?"

Wordlessly, because he is afraid to ruin the moment with a witty comment gone wrong (as there are so many ways words can go wrong, he knows), he takes another step forward and all the space left between them is barely an inch at all and her breath and his breath mix together in the tiny space he had reserved for this. He was giving her the chance to step back, to look away, to laugh it off. It is the right thing to do, he tells himself, even though he knows that if she did any of those things he'd be totally and utterly devastated.

But she isn't. She doesn't move a muscle as he holds her gaze, assessing.

He doesn't know what finally did it: her eyes or her breath or her slightly parted lips, red and inviting, or his own long-crumbling resolve finally dissipating, but in a split second he has closed the remaining distance and is kissing her gently, longingly. His fingers find their way to her cheek and it is all he can do to stifle a moan as she begins to kiss him back because he has wanted this for so long it had seemed next to impossible. And he has long learned that dreaming about something and imagining something almost always lead to disappointment in the end. But this kiss - their first, he hopes, of many - makes his heart swell and his soul hum in celebration of a yearning fulfilled finally. Beautifully.

It's a while before tongues cease dancing and their lips part from one another and some part of his long-gone brain wakes up just in time for him to catch his breath. Oxygen fills his lungs as his heart revels in being filled with her, and it is all he could do to simply look at her for a while. Her face betrays no emotion and if his heart wasn't still pounding and vestiges of her taste still lingers on his lips, he wouldn't have known they had been kissing moments before. He waits for her reaction with bated breath, and idly he wonders if he'd ever get to kiss her again.

Finally, thankfully, she opens her mouth in a breath to say suddenly, "It is, I believe," she pauses, her eyes shining abruptly in mischief. "Your turn to retaliate."

He caught a glimpse of her beautifully wicked grin split-seconds before he covered her mouth once more with his. Her grin transforms into a light giggle right before she returns his kiss with equal passion, and he is completely and utterly lost in the kiss. In this. In the whole new concept of _them_.

His lips meet hers once, twice, thrice, and she murmurs an odd mixture of profanities and prayers against his lips and skin and he wraps his arms around her in an embrace he is quite sure he never wants to relinquish. His soul is singing now, and the room is spinning, and the rest of the world in its dreary September storms and terrible war disappears, until all that's left of the world, his world, is _her_ -

"Ehem," comes a voice from the doorway.

He moves his lips reluctantly away from the curious little path he had been tracing along her jaw to look at his best friend and smile. Sirius bursts into a laugh and declares that they simply must hold prank wars every week, and perhaps next time he'll get a pretty girl to snog for himself as well.

He joins in with his best friend's guffaw and revels in the fact that Tonks does as well. All right then, he decides: his world was Tonks, the woman his soul lives and sings for, and Sirius.


End file.
